With the SIGGRAPH OpenGL BOF now past, Nick Haemel from AMD has written a blog post about OpenGL 3 and the reasoning behind the choices made. "After testing an approach that would have a drastic effect on the API, requiring complete OpenGL application rewrites and not introducing any of the long awaited features modern GPUs are capable of [...] GL 3.0 takes two important steps to moving open standard graphics forward in a major way. The first is to provide core and ARB extension access to the new capabilities of hardware. The second is to create a roadmap that allows developers to see what parts of core specifications will be going away in the future, also providing the OpenGL ARB with a way to introduce new features faster."

Perhaps OpenGL 3.0 will invite developers to let go the Vista only DirectX 10 to get the most markets share (Windows, Mac and Linux)

Not sure about this. This new release might look promising from an user's POV, but it's still the same 15-years-old state-driven API for the developers. The majority of the features introduced in 3.0 were already available as extensions for quite a while. Hey, it's still behind the Direct3D 10 API in terms of features even though the latter came out almost two years ago!

I had great expectations for this new version, as it was looking to be a major overhaul at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the Khronos Group choked for some reason and we're left with something that should have been tagged "2.2" or "1.8". I will probably stick with OpenGL because I care about portability, but I don't know for how long. Things are looking quite grim when people are just sticking around because of a lack of alternatives.